Conference Program

Designing, in a situated manner, how people work together constitutes a foundational condition for collective work to take on regenerative qualities (Cole, 2012; Toner et al., 2023), understood in systemic, bio-anthropo-psycho-socio-historical (Morin, 2021), and environmental terms. In a global context marked by interconnected complex challenges (Sarkar & Kotler, 2025), a polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2022), collaboration between actors at different scales has become indispensable. Metadesign, – the design of the structures and processes through which people design together – emerges as a strategic lever for democratic organizational innovation.

Academia, as many other sectors, is not exempt from dysfunctions: its structural and procedural arrangements have crystallized over time and rarely been subject to intentional redesign. Such dysfunctions affect less privileged members asymmetrically (Ganugi & Marocchini, 2025), limiting their ability to fully express their potential and contributing to the reproduction of internal inequalities.

This article investigates ‘organizational design’ as a metadesign practice through the lens of the Organizational Compass model (Bucci, 2025), presenting its application within the 40th cycle of the PhD program in Design for Social Change at ISIA Roma. The Compass systematizes the organizational “How,” conceived as the intermediate space between the “Why” (purpose, vision, mission) and the “What” (products, services and systems). The “How” is articulated into six interrelated areas: Structure (the distribution of authority and responsibilities), Decisions (decision-making methods and tools), Participation (engagement and sense of belonging), Information (information flows and knowledge management), Resources (shared management of economic, spatial, and energetic assets), and Learning (feedback loops activating in response to emerging needs and project dynamics).

Ecosistemica is a design and research company that adopts systemic approaches to organizational processes and social innovation, with a focus on participatory design, self-governance, and regenerative practices. It constitutes the professional context in which the authors develop and apply their methodological frameworks. Unlike Ecosistemica’s consultancy practice, where intervention is conducted by external professionals, the case under investigation unfolds within a peer-to-peer context in which one of the authors is an active member of the doctoral group. The intervention thus takes the form of an emergent action-research process: not initially conceived as a formal experiment, but arising from a shared intention to make organizational processes clearer, more equitable, and more effective.

During the first year of implementation, several innovations were introduced: a fractal structure with explicit roles (leader, note-taker, facilitator), shared documentation standards, and feedback cycles at both individual (peer performance reviews) and collective levels (project retrospectives). The article analyzes these innovations, how they were introduced, and their early observable effects on individual well-being and collective effectiveness, ultimately asking what metadesign might offer as a practice of democratic innovation within an academic setting.